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Italian Translation

Italian is a romance language, derived from Latin, and shares this distinction with French and Spanish. It’s spoken by 70 million people across the world. Italian is spoken in Italy, neighboring Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, and other countries. Argentina has the distinction of having Italian as its second most spoken language.

Italian is traceable all the way back to the 900s. One of the first written examples of it was in a legal document called Placiti Cassinesi for a land dispute between Southern Italian monasteries between 960 and 963.

The Influence of Dante

It wasn’t until Dante Alighieri, one of Italy’s most well-known authors that the language was standardized. Until Alighieri wrote his book The Devine Comedy, most literature was written in Latin. He opted to write in the language of the common people. The dialect he chose was spoken in Tuscan and it became the standard for the Italian language and literature that is spoken today.

Italian Unity

There are many dialects of Italian and each one is considered its own independent language. This is because Italy was not unified in one country until 1861. At that point. Tuscan Italian became the official language. But just 2.5 percent of people could actually speak it. Today, around 30 percent of Italian dialects are considered endangered by UNESCO.

Italian and Music

Italian is the language of music with terms like crescendo, forte, and soprano. Musical notation came about during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Since many composers at the time were also Italian, it became the standard language of music.